Global Warming? Better Figure Out How to Live With It

Posted on May 31, 2006

From U.S. News & World Report

Neo-swamp coastal wetlands, such as those being created by planting mangrove trees in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, are seen as effective barriers to the more severe storms that could be the result of warmer air and rising sea levels. It’s just one way scientists are trying to get ahead of the global warming problem that many now see as inevitable.

Even if people everywhere unplugged their appliances, left their cars home, and shuttered their factories today, enough fossil fuel emissions are already in the atmosphere to heat up the planet an additional 1 degree Fahrenheit this century, experts say. In reality, however, emissions are increasing—and scenarios put the likely temperature increases at 2.5 to 8 degrees over the same span.

While politicians wrangle over mitigation, i.e., cutting emissions of gases like carbon dioxide and methane, some environmentalists and policymakers are increasingly focusing on the controversial concept of adaptation—preparing for changes increasingly seen as inevitable.

Adaptation has long been the third rail of green politics for fear it would pull the focus away from fixing the problem. For many, however, the next debate in the climate-change debate is not why the planet is warming, or if we can stop it. It is this: How do we live with it?

Since people and governments have been ignoring the problem for about thirty years, people will have to practice harm reduction AND adaptation. There is no other choice now, although there might have been once. The changes we are seeing now are just the beginning of a cycle that is already established.

We simply have to stop wasting everything - water, gas, food, energy, and time. No more talking about it.

As the Red Queen said to Alice in “Through the Looking Glass” -

“‘Now, here, I see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

How do we live with global warming? Who’s the we, if by the end of this century it turns out that the Arctic & Antarctica are the only habitable places on earth, and how much food will there then be, and for how many of us and/or our children? A one degree Fahrenheit temperature rise, if that’s indeed the best case scenario, still beats the 2.5 - 8 degree that’s projected if we continue to do nothing. Who’s behind this defeatism, anyhow? Is there an oil-industry funded think tank involved here? Will they be the ones to do the triaging when it’s down to who is and who isn’t going to be allowed to livei. “Sorry, no food for you today, being that there’s barely enough for those of us who are in charge.” Hey, this is about the survival of life on earth. Hell no, we won’t learn to live with global warming.